Comp-U-News from Comp-U-Talk

April 2016

Curiosity killed the cat.
~ Mom

It’s been a slow
week in Lake Wobegon…Well, truthfully, I have no idea what
happened in Lake Wobegon, but I do know that it has been an uneventful month at
Comp-U-Talk.The big news nationally is several hospitals
fell to ransomware.Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in
Los Angeles was offline for more than a week and eventually paid $17,000 to get
their data back.Methodist Hospital in Henderson, Kentucky
declared a state of emergency but was able to restore their system from backups.The latest casualty (March 28) is MedStar Health, located in the
Maryland/Washington DC area.At the time of this writing,
(April 5) there still hasn’t been an announcement of full function restored.Although, it does appear they will be successful at restoring backups and
won’t have to succumb to paying the ransom. (http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ransomware-why-hospitals-are-the-perfect-targets/)

So how do you
protect yourself?There are a couple of ways.First, pay attention to what you click on.As kids,
mom always harped that curiosity killed the cat.(We later
learned that fast moving cars can kill cats too, but that’s a whole different
subject.)As an adult employed in the computer technology
field, I’m really beginning to fully understand what that “kill the cat”
statement means.Just because the email or the link looks
appetizing doesn’t mean it is good for you.Some of the
payloads will make you very, very ill.

Human error is
by far the largest contributing factor to malware infections.If you are part of a business, we can arrange for employee training with
a short video course and a monthly refresher of what to watch out for.It’s low key and low cost, especially when compared to the downtime
caused by trashed data.

If you compute
in a networked environment, we suggest getting a network penetration assessment
to check for vulnerabilities from both inside the building and from the outside.Prices vary based on size and type of network.We
would love to help you secure your network.Contact Janet for
more details.